The Naylors (5 page)

He decided to start this unpremeditated Oxford jaunt with a visit to Blackwell’s bookshop, so he turned north at Carfax and fought his way up Cornmarket Street. It was like that because the Corn was jam-packed with tourists who bumped into you as they anxiously consulted guidebooks, and also with skimpily-clad and husky young people of both sexes, bearing on their backs huge burdens suggestive of wayfaring life in the Middle Ages. Many of these latter were no doubt students, and could be regarded as wandering scholars of a sort. But they were wandering scholars who had come not to study but merely to stare.

Opposite Balliol an attractive young woman – her attractiveness only enhanced by unisex garments which somehow emphasised the charms of a far from unisex figure – offered George a leaflet which he accepted with a murmur of thanks. Out of her sight, he was about to crumple it up, when it occurred to him that it might be not a notice of some theatrical venture or the like but a summons to holy living to which in his present condition he ought to accord a fair hearing. So he glanced at it, and the words ‘Forget it’, printed in bold type, caught his eye. That was what Ron had said to Mrs Archer, so George took another look. He read:

CIVIL DEFENCE? – FORGET IT

There’s no defence against nuclear weapons, and no escape. Anybody left alive in the total mess will die soon – or wish they had.

George thrust this – and along with it apparently other disturbing thoughts as well – into a pocket. He then found himself quickening his pace towards Blackwell’s.

The entrance to this booky house (as a deceased Poet Laureate had styled it) was reassuringly unchanged, and George reflected that it was perhaps the most effectively symbolic structure in Oxford. Strait is the gate that leads to knowledge as well as to salvation, and the celebrated Blackwell doorway is surely by some inches narrower than any other in Oxford. Edging through it – which involved jostling with an American lady clutching a book called English Farmhouse Fare – George did, however, find that there had been alterations here and there. The odd little domestic fireplace near the entrance, which perhaps symbolised in its turn the undoubted fact that the best companion by one’s hearth is a book, was still in evidence. But had it not, he thought, slewed itself round a little, as if disposed to cast the warmth of learning in a fresh direction? And where were the two commanding ladies who had sat hard by and taken your money as you went out? They had departed, and in their stead rather young women in the body of the shop now combined the sale of books with a mysterious gazing upon flickering electronic screens. Further on, you went down a small staircase – and there suddenly beneath you was a vast subterraneous chamber exhibiting terrace below terrace of books in divine but intimidating abundance. Not only is the gate to knowledge strait. Knowledge itself is as a deep well.

Boldly, George sought out Theology. It didn’t, presumably, bear as high a proportion to the rest of Blackwell’s stock as it would have done in any similar repository a hundred years ago. But there was still a lot of it – the presented spectacle, indeed, suggesting itself as most readily computable not in thousands of volumes but in hundreds of yards. And there was nothing second-hand about the exhibition. These were all new books – although many of them looked as if they had been that for a good many years. Hadn’t he as an undergraduate mugged up Elliott-Binns on The Development of English Theology in the Later Nineteenth Century? And what about Schaefer’s Die katholische Wiedergeburt der englischen Kirche: surely that had been on his own shelves for quite a long time now? There was rank upon rank of the heavy stuff, stiffly upstanding behind their gilded spines: armies of unalterable law. But fronting these, on a line of tables so long as positively to lend the impression of softening into distance, were exhibited, flat and face-upward after the fashion of a bookshop’s most readily vendible wares, innumerable sprightly-seeming paperbacks of popular devotion. Fifty years ago – George reflected – these would have been known as ‘religious tracts’, and they would have been got up to look as forbidding as was inexpensively possible. Every need was catered for. There was a book called What to Tell your Children about Jesus. There was another called Prayers for Busy People.

George paused here before the evangelising labours of the late C.S. Lewis, who in point of proliferation appeared to be neck and neck with a former Bishop of Woolwich. Overcoming the professional’s unworthy predisposition to hold the work of amateurs in poor esteem, George examined some of Lewis’s books, and decided to buy one called The Pilgrim’s Regress. It appeared to be distinctly acerbic in tone, and might serve to attune him to Father Hooker. George then went upstairs again, found the current fiction, and chose the two longest novels on offer. He might be at Plumley, he was reflecting, for quite some time. He then wandered round the shop at random, wondering whether to pick up another book or two as he went. That was what you did. You accumulated as many books as you felt you needed, and then took them up to the electronic ladies.

Thus meandering through the booky house, George was happy for the first time in weeks.

‘Ah, Naylor! A good afternoon to you.’

George turned round and saw that he was being addressed by an old man who, like himself, had a pile of books under his arm. A very old man. Realising this, George offered his own ‘good afternoon’ with a deference that turned out to be entirely proper. For it was the Gumpher. It was the Gumpher, without a doubt.

‘Gumphy,’ the Gumpher said informatively, and with a hint of rebuke softened by a chuckle so high-pitched as to attract the attention of several of Blackwell’s browsing customers. Even mute, the Gumpher appeared unlikely to pass without remark. He moved with the aid of two sticks of awkward length, as if somebody was neglecting to chop the requisite centimetres from them every now and then to accommodate a general shrinkage of his person. Second childhood had befallen at least the Gumpher’s earthly tenement. His eyelids, distressingly everted, suggested a baby that ought to have been put to bed long ago. And he must literally have required bedtime attention, since it was impossible to imagine him successfully extricating his limbs from the stiff and snuff-bespattered carapace in which he tottered around. But he did so totter, and even managed to bear that burden of books along with him. ‘It’s some time since we met, my dear Naylor,’ this abraded patriarch said. ‘I don’t forget a pupil. I don’t forget a pupil, I say. I don’t forget a pupil.’

Warden Gumphy (for George knew him to have become that) was (like George himself?) a clergyman. He had never been George’s tutor of the ordinary workaday sort, having already become too senior a fellow of the college for such labour. But he had been George’s moral tutor. He had seen George, that is, for a few minutes at the beginning of each term and inquired about his vacation reading. Not what he had been reading specifically for Schools, but his general reading. ‘In a general sense. In a general sense, I say,’ the Gumpher would insist, as he removed his spectacles, polished them vigorously, and returned them to his nose. It was less the Gumpher’s self-evident nonagenarian standing than his retention of that particular idiom or trope that rolled back the years for George now. George found himself trying to secrete his two bulky novels beneath the inadequate cover of C.S. Lewis’s belligerent fable. Then it struck him that the Gumpher would probably hold a poorer opinion of Lewis than even of Salman Rushdie or David Storey, so he abandoned this attempted concealment and sought for the proper thing to say.

‘It’s delightful, Mr Warden, to see you looking so well.’ George felt that this, if conveyed without too much undercurrent of surprise, couldn’t be far wrong.

‘The daily constitutional, Naylor. The daily constitutional, I say. And how is the business, Naylor? Is it looking up? Is it looking up, I say?’

This was perplexing. The Warden was presumably referring to the business of pastoral care. Was George attracting good congregations when he preached at matins on Sundays? Was he attracting anybody at all to weekday affairs? These were natural and proper questions for a concerned priest to ask. But here again the Gumpher’s idiom had been, like his person, a shade odd.

‘I’ve had a small flutter on that stable myself,’ the Warden said. ‘Yes, a flutter, I say. Since people are to have more and more free time for it all, more and more free time.’

The Gumpher believed himself to be talking to George’s father! As George realised this, his head swam a little. His father had been in on the first major expansion of those leisure industries which were now understood to be the main concern of George’s brother, Edward. And George could recall that his moral tutor’s having formerly been his father’s tutor for some Honour School had been a point of minor college curiosity. Such linkings and continuities were not uncommon. And the Gumpher (who would surely be a centenarian quite soon) might very readily slip a generation when recalling his dealings with Naylors. They had neither of them, George or his father, been particularly memorable undergraduates. But this didn’t make the present situation, here in Blackwell’s shop, other than a bit dodgy. To say baldly, ‘I’m not John Naylor; I’m his younger son George’, might be disconcerting and almost, indeed, discourteous.

‘And I warned you, I say,’ the Gumpher was saying.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Warden?’ It was evident that George in his bewilderment had let his attention wander.

‘But I was wrong,’ the Gumpher said, with that ready confession of error that marks (or ought to mark) the true scholar. ‘At a Gaudy, it was. You remember it, Naylor? The first Gaudy we held after the Armistice, it must have been. Not ill fare, considering the times. And still plenty of sound wine.’

‘The Armistice?’ George repeated stupidly. He now felt that inside his head something was going awkwardly numb. ‘In 1918?’

‘Young and confident, Naylor. I was young and confident. You must remember that. I had only just got my fellowship. And I did approve of your buying land with that bit of family money. Nothing like it. Nothing like it, I say. But proposing to cover it with golf-courses was another matter. I was justified in urging caution upon you there. However, it all turned out well. Well, I say, well. Though to my mind still, Naylor, not quite a game for gentlemen. Cads and caddies, we used to say. Cads and caddies.’

A caddie had once been a cadet, George recalled. The semantic change showed what happens to younger sons. But this thought was only fleetingly in his mind. For now the full truth had come to him. He was being mistaken by this awful old man not for his father but for his grandfather. His grandfather had been at the college too – and had been the first founder of those family fortunes depending on golf-courses and bowling-greens and ‘public’ tennis courts. George’s head was still swimming, but he managed a little chronology. The thing was feasible. The Gumpher had seen not two generations of Naylors through the college but three. Three. Somebody would probably root out the fact and refer to it as edifying when the place held Warden Gumphy’s memorial service.

George, as he got away from this weird colloquy, felt that he ought (inwardly of course) to be laughing. In fact he was rather frightened. The Gumpher had by no means been a clown all his days. In early old age he had been notable in the streets of Oxford as a person of grave consequence. In perambulating infancy he had been patted on the head by Matthew Arnold, probably with a little extra unction because the Gumphys were understood to have owned the greater part of Cumberland. Having become Head of a college, he had no doubt at some time served his term as Vice-Chancellor of the university. He would have been perfectly up to hob-nobbing with visiting Royalty and Ministers of the Crown. And now this: an old creature with generation upon generation squashed up and muddled in his disintegrating grey matter. ‘Distressing’ was the decorous word for the unexpected encounter.

This was certainly an unbalanced view of the episode. Warden Gumphy wasn’t really comprehensively gaga. His memories, if they had re-sorted themselves oddly, could hardly be called straitened. Leaving Blackwell’s, he would return home to the villa of his retirement somewhere in North Oxford; read, and it might be pungently annotate, the books he had bought; and probably consume a satisfactory dinner. No, one needn’t be upset about the Gumpher.

But of course George Naylor was revisiting Oxford in a vulnerable frame of mind, and this was still his condition when he took his purchases up to the pay-desk. Handed a bill by the young woman coping with him, he put a hand in a pocket and (since he was habitually inclined to be vague about such things) supposed that it had conveniently come in contact with a banknote. This he presented to the young woman. She glanced at it without apparent surprise, and then turned it round so that George could inspect it too. So he read:

IN THE EVENT

OF A

NUCLEAR WAR

there will be no chances,

there will be no survivors—

all will be obliterated—

nuclear devastation is not science fiction—

it is a matter of fact.

This was embarrassing. George offered apologies, mumbled explanations, and produced a pocket-book. The young woman smiled at him kindly, and even provided a free plastic bag – a kind of academic first cousin to the receptacles so abundantly carried by the Mesdames Bowman and Archer – for the labours of Lewis, Rushdie and Storey. George, having manoeuvred this through the narrow door, found himself back in Broad Street.

It now came into his head that it would be pleasant to drop into the Bodleian Library, a place in which random conversations weren’t allowed. Readers did occasionally utter to one another – but almost furtively, and only upon matters of immediate learned concern. There wouldn’t be time in which to order any books, but George knew of catalogues and check-lists and bibliographies which would at once afford him a view of the present state of Jacobite studies. ‘Jacobite’, of course, had nothing to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie and people of that sort; its reference was to that area of ecclesiastical history and doctrinal controversy in the sixth century upon which George had made himself an authority as a young man. That had been a long time ago, and he felt that he was not well up in whatever work had been done in the interval. Indeed, he was culpably rusty all round. It didn’t much worry him that he hadn’t much kept up with contemporary Christian apologetics. He could cope with logical positivism – so dire-seeming a threat in his youth – and demonstrate, at least to his own satisfaction, that it contradicted itself. But what about the larger implications of existentialism? He had already been losing interest as these hove up, and was undeniably hazy over such issues. But about all this he didn’t really bother, although he had a foreboding that his negligence was going to place him at an awkward disadvantage with Father Hooker. But his own stretch of early ecclesiastical history was another matter.